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Course Description: With readings from Gilgamesh and The Odyssey to Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, this course explores how great writers refract their world and how their works are transformed when they intervene in our global cultural landscape today. No national literature has ever grown up in isolation from the cultures around it; from the earliest periods, great works of literature have probed the tensions, conflicts, and connections among neighboring cultures and often more distant regions as well. Focusing particularly on works that take the experience of the wider world as their theme, this course will explore the varied artistic modes in which great writers have situated themselves in the world, helping us to understand the deep roots of today's intertwined global cultures.
Click here to access the Online Museum (where you can find text, images, and videos that shed light on the historical contexts, global circulations, and contemporary repercussions of the texts that we focus on in the course):
Jan 23-27: Introduction: What Is World Literature?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe formulated his concept of world literature (Weltliteratur) in the early nineteenth century while reading a mixture of Greek and Latin classics, Persian and Serbian poetry, and a Chinese novel. Whereas Goethe saw world literature in terms of an international marketplace, a hundred years later Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-Western winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, gave a new meaning to the term, emphasizing universal values. These writers will introduce us to the astonishingly bold attempt to look at literature as a single, interconnected whole.
Jan 30 - Feb 3: The Birth of Literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh
Written three and a half millennia ago, The Epic of Gilgamesh was forgotten for nearly two thousand years, until Austin Henry Layard and the Iraqi Hormuzd Rassam excavated the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh. There, the library of Ashurbanipal yielded the long-forgotten text, inscribed on clay tablets, the first great masterpiece of world literature and itself a text about exploring the world.
Feb 6-10: Homer and the Archeology of the Classical Past: The Odyssey
World literature has always rested on a foundation of classical works. Continuing the discussion from the previous week, this unit will take up The Odyssey in light of Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations in Troy. Focusing on the episodes from the epic that emphasis cultural contact, we read this text as a quintessential meditation on cultural conflict and exploration.
February 13-17: West-Eastern Conversations: The Thousand and One Nights
This work long circulated within the Middle East as popular entertainment and then took a crucial detour into France, where many of its most famous tales first appeared in the translation by Antoine Galland in the early eighteenth century. Scheherazade’s tales of transformation and magic, travel and adventure have themselves changed shape they have circulated abroad in translation, from Galland to Sir Richard Burton to Hussain Haddawy in the present.
February 20-24: The Floating World: The Tale of Genji
A masterpiece of classical Japanese literature, the Genji monogatari was written around the year 1000 by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman deeply learned in the Chinese tradition usually mastered only by men. Drawing on a wealth of Chinese and Japanese poetry and on her keen observations of court life around her, Murasaki revolutionized the vernacular Japanese romance tradition of her day.
February 27-March 3:The First National Epic: The Lusiads
All of the major qualities of Renaissance culture come together in Luis Vaz de Camões’ epic poem The Lusiads (1572), a work that almost single-handedly created vernacular Portuguese as a literary language. Camões rewrites Homer’s Odyssey as the modern tale of his ancestor Vasco da Gama’s voyage of discovery seventy-five years earlier around the tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean to south India. Mythic grandeur coexists with modern realism as Camões strives to present Portugal not as the margin of Europe but as the center of the newly evolving world system of trade, conquest, and cultural exchange.
March 6-10: Enlightenment in the Colonies: Candide
Voltaire’s sparkling satire ranges widely around the world, from Europe to South America, before ending in Constantinople, where Candide determines to cultivate his own garden at the crossroads of East and West. We’ll look particularly at the ways in which Voltaire uses non-Western cultures to provide a vantage point for social critique, and the ways he uses satire as a more effective mode than his earlier essays and poetry.
March 13-17: Spring Break
March 20-24: China and Its Neighbors: Lu Xun and Eileen Chang, selected stories
The former medical student Lu Xun became a crucial figure in Chinese letters by connecting China to its larger and rapidly modernizing neighbors Russia and Japan through his work as a translator and writer. His short stories set the tone and agenda for much of China’s “New Culture” movement and have made him a major figure in modern world literature. A generation later, the innovative Shanghai-based Eileen Chang carried through the project of writing a new vernacular literature for a China in transition, capturing the intertwined ambiguities of national and sexual politics alike.
March 27 -31: Inventing Latin America: Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
This week takes up one of the most remarkable of all modern writers, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, whose haunting, enigmatic tales blend Latin American localism and universalism, often through philosophical parables, pseudo-commentaries, and detective stories.
April 3-7: From Empire to Globe: Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman
The imperial trade brought new cultural resources to writers engaged in the anticolonial struggle against the British and other European empires. This week's takes up the Nobel Prize-winning Wole Soyinka, whose great drama centrally treats the cultural, religious, and political tensions of the late colonial and early postcolonial periods.
April 10-14: East-West Encounters: Salman Rushdie, East, West; Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies
In this week, we look at selected stories by two mesmerizing writers who deal with cross-cultural encounters in a global age. In different ways, the Booker Prize-winning Salman Rushdie and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jhumpa Lahiri use global English as a stylistic medium and a cultural-political vantage point to probe questions of personal identity and belonging in a world of global conflict and creative exchange.
April 17-21: Istanbul in – or as – the World: Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
This week centers on the best-known novel by one of the most popular contemporary world authors, Orhan Pamuk, who in 2006 became the second-youngest winner of the Nobel Prize in literature – a remarkable achievement for a writer from a peripheral country writing in a non-European language. Pamuk is also a probing, reflective essayist, who has written extensively on the issues of cultural identity in a society straddling “East” and “West.”
April 24-28: World Literature Today
Our final week will explore the movement of world literature into the twenty-first century, and out into the wider world of popular culture and the new universe of the Internet. Candidates for the next rising star of world literature will be proposed and presented by members of the course.
Course Components
- Participation in online discussion (10% Quiz; 20% Posting) 30%
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Undergraduate credit takers: Either Wiki on one of the texts and online presentation of the wiki (first draft: due section time, 40%; final version: due April 28, 60% ) OR One research paper (first draft: 4-5pages, due March 17, 40%; final version: 7-8 pages, due April 28, 60%) 40%
Graduate credit takers: One research paper (a 2-3 page memo notes/outline & an annotated bibliography, both in preparation for the final research paper, due March 17, 40%; a 15-page research paper, due April 28, 60%) 40%
- Online open book final exam 30%
Wiki requirement. If you choose to do a wiki project instead of a paper, we ask you to create a Wikipedia entry on one of the texts we discuss in class. You sign up for one text and produce a first draft of your Wikipedia-style entry by the time your section (the section dedicated to your text) meets. You briefly present this draft online and receive feedback. Using this feedback you then create a finished entry by the end of the semester. Your wiki should follow the genre of the Wikipedia entry, including links, sources, and footnotes. The only rule is that you cannot use any material currently found on the actual Wikipedia website. Your wiki will be posted on the class website, not on the Wikipedia website. However, once your completed entry has been vetted, we'll recommend that you incorporate it into the existing Wikipedia entry (since you will not have used material from the existing entry, what you produce will nicely complement what's already there). We assume that most students will produce their wikis individually, but if you want to collaborate with someone, you may do so (you will, however, receive the same grade).
A note on collaboration: Discussion and the exchange of ideas are essential to academic work, and is expected in the case of the wiki. For the term paper, you are encouraged to consult with your classmates on the choice of paper topics and to share sources. You may find it useful to discuss your chosen topic with your peers, particularly if you are working on the same topic as a classmate. However, you should ensure that any work you submit for evaluation is the result of your own research and writing and that it reflects your own approach to the topic. You must also adhere to standard citation practices in this discipline and properly cite any books, articles, websites, lectures, etc. that have helped you with your work. If you received any help with your writing (feedback on drafts, etc), you must also acknowledge this assistance. It is very important that you fully cite sources and avoid the risk of shading over into plagiarism – the use of another person’s ideas or writing without giving them proper credit. Consequences of plagiarism can range from failure on the paper to dismissal from the course to dismissal from Harvard. You are responsible for familiarizing yourself with Harvard’s policy on Academic Honesty, which you can find online at:
http://handbook.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k79903&pageid=icb.page418752
Plagiarism
You are responsible for understanding Harvard Extension School policies on academic integrity (www.extension.harvard.edu/resources-policies/student-conduct/academic-integrity) and how to use sources responsibly. Not knowing the rules, misunderstanding the rules, running out of time, submitting the wrong draft, or being overwhelmed with multiple demands are not acceptable excuses. There are no excuses for failure to uphold academic integrity. To support your learning about academic citation rules, please visit the Harvard Extension School Tips to Avoid Plagiarism (www.extension.harvard.edu/resources-policies/resources/tips-avoid-plagiarism), where you'll find links to the Harvard Guide to Using Sources and two free online 15-minute tutorials to test your knowledge of academic citation policy. The tutorials are anonymous open-learning tools.
Accessibility
The Extension School is committed to providing an accessible academic community. The Accessibility Office offers a variety of accommodations and services to students with documented disabilities. Please visit www.extension.harvard.edu/resources-policies/resources/disability-services-accessibility for more information.
Assigned Readings
The Epic of Gilgamesh: full text (40 pages)
The Odyssey:
The core readings are books 5-12 of the Odyssey. You might also want to read the opening and the ending, especially the penultimate book, book 23.
The Thousand and One Nights:
Readings: The opening stories (stories before "The First Night"), "The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies", "The First Dervish's Tale", "The Second Dervish's Tale", "The Tale of the Envious and the Envied", "The Third Dervish's Tale", "The Tale of the First Lady, the Mistress of the House", "The Tale of the Second Lady, the Flogged One", "Conclusion" (in the "Files" folder)
The Tale of Genji:
Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 9 in the Penguin edition, plus the “Genji final selection” pdf attached to this message.
Camões, The Lusiads (68 pages):
Canto 1 (pp. 3-24)
Canto 4, stanza 66 through end of Canto 5 (pp. 90-118)
Canto 6, stanza 75 through Canto 7, stanza 14 (pp. 134-41)
Canto 8, stanzas 76 through 87 (pp. 154-56)
Canto 10, stanzas 1-14 and stanza 125 to the end (pp. 197-99 and 222-28)
Voltaire, Candide
Lu Xun, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales (75pp)
Preface to Outcry (pp. 15-20)
Diary of a Madman (pp. 21-31)
The Real Story of Ah-Q (pp. 79-123)
Preface to Old Stories Retold (pp. 295-97)
Eileen Chang: "Love in a Fallen City"; "Sealed off"
Borges, Ficciones
- Foreword
- Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Teritus
- Pierre Menard
- Herbert Quain
- Library of Babel
- Garden of Forking Paths
- Death and the Compass
Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman
Salman Rushdie’s East, West; Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies
“The Prophet’s Hair,” “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” and if time permits, all three of the final set of stories, but particularly “Chekov and Zulu.”
Lahiri: "A Temporary Matter"; "Interpreter of Maladies"; "The Third and Final Continent"
My Name is Red:
Readings: the first seven, very short chapters, chapters 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, as well as chapters 18, 19, 20. This way you will get a sense of the main characters and of the main conflict. Also recommend 29, which contains a detailed description of miniatures, and 47. Maybe you will want to know how it ends and keep reading . . .
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